Movie Gallery picks up the pieces of MovieBeam

MovieBeam's short, sordid history hasn't exactly come to a close, but it's certainly a far cry from the service's once lofty goals. First it was spun off from Disney, with Intel and Cisco investing an extra $50 million in the newly separated company to further develop the service, now that company has been sold to Movie Gallery for a fraction of the amount that's been spent on the service over the past few years. According to paidContent.org, Movie Gallery plans to spend less $10 million on the service in 2007, including all acquisition costs and development expenses. In the short term, it appears that Movie Gallery plans to continue to operate the MovieBeam service in the 31 metropolitan areas in the U.S. it's currently available in, and it'll also begin to market the service in its Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery stores, as well as on its website. The company also appears to have some longer-term plans for the service, including downloading or streaming movies over the Internet, although it's not providing any more specific details just yet.

Read - Movie Gallery Press Release
Read - paidContent.org

[Via Techdirt]

[Liqwid @ Mar 9th 2007 11:45AM]

Movie Gallery sucks(period)

[HW @ Mar 9th 2007 12:26PM]

I work at a Hollywood Video and the option for Movie Beam has been on our transaction software for about 2 weeks now and I was wondering if it was talking about this movie beam. I bet it'll turn into a netflix type thing for Hollywood like Blockbuster has but all digital instead.

[J @ Mar 9th 2007 1:35PM]

How is this service any better than VOD from your cable company?

[Atro @ Mar 12th 2007 2:50PM]

It is not better at all. Some people, have horrible cable service. I am in Phoenix AZ and we have ZERO on demand service. 5th largest city in the USA and NO on demand service. Our pay per view is only about 8 channels as well. I lived in Orlando and Brighthouse communicatios had HBO ,Showtime, Cinemax, Cartoon Network plus plus plus and dozens of on demand pay per view. The messed up thing is that I pay more for my service in Phoenix then I did in Orlando. Movie-Beam is a good thing, 10 movies a week and HDTV movies for a dollar more...

[Peace @ Mar 9th 2007 3:06PM]

Movie gallery is much better than block buster,and I hope that this goes bigger, much bigger but hooked up to the internet like it says it might. Antenae service sucks.